All Dressed Up With Someplace to Go

Los Angeles artist Elizabeth Pulsinelli’s discovery of a box of women’s and girls’ dress patterns at a garage sale was the unlikely basis of a richly textured, satisfyingly unstructured conceptual art piece. At the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University through Nov. 22, “Patterns” consists of more than 60 unbleached muslin garments in styles spanning the 1950s to the 1970s.

The installation seems to be about a number of things. It’s about handicraft, self-sufficiency and the mundane life of fashion. It’s also literally about a labor of love.

The garments allow you follow the chronology of the mother-daughter history in two parallel ways. You can chart the increasing casualness of clothing styles (from the era of wasp-waisted, full-skirted dresses worn with gloves and a hat to easygoing flared pants).

You can trace the physical and emotional growth of a girl who once wore a one-piece sleeper with “feet” and “ears” and later donned a wedding dress. But while the girl grows older, women’s styles grow younger; both mother and daughter live through the ‘60s, when youth culture becomes the fulcrum around which fashion revolves.

Home dressmaking--probably less common today than it was in less-hurried decades past--can seem mysterious to those of us who don’t practice it. By displaying only the illustrated pattern envelopes, not the patterns themselves, Pulsinelli reinforces the “professional” mystique of this highly female-identified domestic activity, making it somewhat analogous to photography (her own specialty).

Not seeing the patterns is rather like not having access to the negative when we look at a photograph. Of course, both negatives and patterns can generate numerous copies, but each is likely to differ ever so slightly from the others simply because of the vagaries of the partly mechanized, partly hand-driven nature of both photography and machine sewing.

Clearly, there’s a lot of room for speculation in the installation, based as it is both on a tiny piece of history and on an artist’s open-ended construct. Did the mother make all these garments, with their neatly finished pleats and darts and sashes and novelty collars? Or did the child eventually learn the secret of turning tissue paper, instructions, fabric and thread into a finished piece?

By sewing all the clothing in undyed muslin--the material used by designers when they originally make up a garment--Pulsinelli abstracts them, allowing us to color them in. In a similar way, we may “color in” the lives of this mother and daughter, or see their clothing in relation to our own maturation and developing clothes sense.

“My Mother, Myself,” the title of that Nancy Friday book, seems particularly apropos. Wearing clothing made for you by someone whose traits you have inherited--at the same time that you are struggling to be your own person--must only reinforce the ties that bind.

Twisting this way and that on their hangers in the gallery breeze as if imitating a model’s runway twirl, these pale garments coyly make public elusive fragments of two private lives that seem to be just slightly varied copies of our own.

* “Patterns,” through Nov. 22 at Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Monday-Friday; 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. Free. (714) 997-6729.